In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: March 2006

Request for the Techies

Can anyone with more tech savvy come up with a small gif of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz doing a little dance?

Thanks much!

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They’re Back

Happy! Happy!

Joy! Joy!

The crew at Pandagon have kicked their unreliable new server host to the curb and are back in business.

De-lurking

So, Kevin over at Slant Truth has continued the discussion about appropriation off of nubian’s post at blackademic about one-night-stand links. (She develops her thoughts some more over here.)

Basically, the problem (part of the problem) is this: a “little” blogger will labor in relative obscurity. Then a “big” blogger will happen onto one of their posts and go, “Neat!” and take it over to their blog to write a post that will drive up and sustain their already-impressive traffic. The “little” blogger may or may not see a spike in traffic; when the “little” blogger does, it will tend to be extremely temporary and mostly silent. The “little” blogger almost never gets to host the discussion about their own post; that happens over at the “big” blogger’s house, and tends to occur in a way that loses most or all of the original topic. It can also occur in space that is hostile to the original blogger.

As you might intuit, marginalization of “little” bloggers and disproportionate audiences for “big” bloggers tends to track marginalization IRL. This discussion is about the invisibility of bloggers of color, particularly those who post candidly about the issues that are important to them.

In brief: Participation, good. Appropriation, not so good. Respect, good. Treating honest discussions like anthrax-filled envelopes, not so good.

Please go share your thoughts on that subject at blackademic or slanttruth.

Onto the specific subject of this post. I’ve been thinking without much success about ways to rework linking and writing so as to:

–Encourage participation in the original discussion on its original terms

–Discourage blog-mining

–Encourage long-term conversations between blogs and bloggers

–Make reading habitual rather than occasional

(I know that there’s no way to fix the problem unconsciously; I’m just wondering if there’s a way to work up a new standard.)

And I’d like to offer this as a little consumer survey about your blog habits, particularly as relates to this space. What gets you to stick around? When do you become engaged? When do you tune out? In the past, have your comments been narrowly focused? And did you go read the linked posts and their archives, or just refresh the leading page?

And finally, are there any structural remodels or frames that you think might mitigate these problems?

Jill’s solution was to link without comment.

KnifeGhost thought of this one:

I just thought of something.

Is there some way for different blogs to host the same comment page?

For example…. You write an interesting post, nubian likes it, she posts it in its entirety at her blog, and the comments from each blog go to the same page?

Think of each post as a plugin of sorts. The post exists in itself outside of any blog that displays it. Any number of blogs could host it and all comments from all blgos would appear together.

Is the technology available/simple to do that?

Listen Up, Lou Dobbs

And the rest of the US media. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has something to tell you:

Open letter to CNN and other mainstream US media outlets:

1. The vast majority of Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S. (75 percent of us) were born and raised here, including many of us who have roots here that predate the arrival of the pilgrims.

2. “Immigrant” is not synonymous with “Latino” and the media should stop pretending they mean the same thing.

3. The CNN analyst who said today “Keep in mind, Latino voters are LEGAL immigrants, not illegal immigrants” should be FIRED for sloppy thinking. MOST LATINOS ARE NOT IMMIGRANTS AT ALL, PINCHE CABRON.

I dunno what “pinche cabron” means, but it can’t be good.

Check out the rest of the post for some righteous smacking-down.

H/T Roxanne.

“When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

-George W. Bush

Except, you know, when we won’t.

In Colombia, for example, the leftist guerrilla group FARC often kidnaps civilians and demands ransom from their relatives. FARC also requires the payment of a “war tax” from Colombians in the regions it controls, upon threat of serious harm. Nearly 2,000 Colombians who faced such circumstances as paying a ransom or “tax” — and who later fled the country and were determined by the United Nations to be refugees — have been denied U.S. resettlement on the basis of the “material support” provision.

In Liberia, a female head of a household was referred to the U.S. resettlement program by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a person particularly vulnerable to attack. Rebels had come to her home, killed her father and beat and gang-raped her. The rebels held her hostage in her own home and forced her to wash their clothes. The woman escaped after several weeks and made her way to a refugee camp. The Department of Homeland Security has decided that because the rebels lived in her house and she washed their clothes, she had provided “material support” to the rebels; the case has been placed on hold.

A Sierra Leonean woman’s house was attacked by rebels in 1992. A young family member was killed with machetes, another minor was subjected to burns and the woman and her daughter were raped. The rebels kept the family captive for days in their own home. Homeland Security has placed the case on hold for “material support” concerns because the family is deemed to have provided housing to the rebels. Under this interpretation, it does not matter whether the support provided was given willingly or under duress.

I’ll also point out that many minority groups in Iraq — Palestinians, for example, who were protected under Saddam Hussein’s regime — are now being systematically slaughtered. American forces are unable to offer protection, and the administration refuses to offer these people refugee status in the United States, because that would be bad for the PR effort in presenting the war as a success.

The “committment” to liberty is disengenuous. We’re perfectly willing to sell liberty-seeking people down the river if they don’t narrowly fit in with our interests — even if it was our policies that directly put them in harm’s way.

You Heard It Here First

New law school ratings are out (pdf). Well, not exactly out, but leaked from U.S. News & World Report. Good on NYU for tying with Columbia for #4. And for Stanford for displacing Harvard as #2. I suspect Harvard’s decline has something to do with their admittance of Ben “vaginas and brown people (and brown people with vaginas!) really scare me” Shapiro, but that’s strictly speculative.

Read More…Read More…

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